Feddit is actually (presumably) hosted in the UK, so if Ofcom actually knew what the Fediverse is they could start trying to demand they do age verification.

I very much doubt Ofcom knows what Feddit is, let alone Lemmy.

The OSA bill in the UK has caused a hamster forum to shut down over concerns of not being able to follow it (or the risks associated with non-compliance). It’s an unbelievably wordy and excessive bill that is a bureaucratic nightmare for small communities.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/18/hamster-forum-local-residents-websites-shut-down-new-laws/

Look at what Reddit is saying. It’s absurd:

For UK users under 18, Reddit said it has to restrict sexually explicit content; content that promotes suicide, deliberate self-injury, and eating disorders; content that incites abuse or hatred against people based upon protected characteristics; bullying content; content that promotes violence or “depicts real or realistic serious violence against a person, an animal, or a fictional creature”; content that promotes challenges or stunts that are likely to cause serious injuries; content that encourages people to use harmful substances or substances in harmful quantities; content that shames people based on body type or physical features; and “content that promotes or romanticizes depression, hopelessness and despair.”

WTF? How is this supposed to work? A system that auto-blocks all NSFW tagged content itself as a blunt instrument is viable - but half the stuff on here, on Reddit here isn’t even necessarily tagged as NSFW when its posted. Are extreme mountain biking or skiing or skateboarding or other similar types videos going to be age-gated because they could be content that “promotes challenges or stunts that are likely to cause serious injuries”? How do you verify whether or not content specifically romanticises “hopelessness” or “despair” exactly? Are Giles Corey songs now 18+? What does that even mean? Even the writing of it is Orwellian.

It also adds “depicts real or realistic serious violence against a person, an animal, or a fictional creature” ???

Are action movie clips now going to be age-gated? Or video game clips? From TV shows and films that are PG-13?

He had changed his position after I wrote that comment I believe.

People need to be the change they want to see. I came here because I wanted to run some communities, but ultimately it was impossible on Reddit. All the names are taken, all the aging mod teams set in stone. You essentially have no meaningful opportunity to build anything new on there. In contrast, and especially with federation, the Fediverse is a completely different system. A fresh start - still after 2 years. And it has way better internal advertisement of communities than Reddit does.

And to be clear, on Reddit you can easily just shout into the wilderness at no-one. Big audience means you can get drowned out.

Apparently, reading the details on there - he might not shut it down.

No idea, but it’s not an active instance so idk what happened.

Disagree. If I run a metal music community, and someone who doesn’t like metal continually goes in there and downvotes everything because, well, they don’t like metal music. What use are they to it? Why wouldn’t I ban them? All they’re doing is hurting the visibility of the community. This is the context in which I would ban downvoters from my community. Serial mass downvoting by people who never otherwise engage with the community, don’t like the topic of the community, and in some cases - the accounts have zero comment history and purely exist to downvote.

I think this is quite different to just ‘wanting an echo-chamber’.

No, I said I haven’t seen 12 downvotes in 5 minutes. I accept for extreme cases it might happen, but for ordinary topical posting in the relevant communities? Never seen it.

Also, I didn’t say anything about restricting it.

But there’s also a large difference between 5 minutes and 24 hours time-wise.

12 downvotes in 5 minutes on ostensibly ‘neutral’ or non-controversial topics are way dodgier to me than 50 in 24 hours. I have never seen downvoting at such a rate anyway.

Yes.

Up to community owners. You can already filter by /new/ now.

That would mean there’s zero quality control and larger communities new posts would flood out older posts. No-one supports this idea.

How would they organise it?

I post a lot on a pretty busy community for lemmy standards and have never seen 12 downvotes in such a short time. Or any number close.

Also I am not sure how 50 downvotes over a day is more sus to you than 12 in 5 minutes.

Only deliberately antagonistic types of posts collect that amount of downvotes that quickly on lemmy in my experience tbh.

That is not normal for innocuous posting

Yeah, I mean I wouldn’t call it “manipulation”. Just vandalism in this case.

Its only really problematic on smaller instances or if you do it continuously for every single post without a good valid reason

And that’s closer to what I am referring to. If someone just hates movies or TV and doesn’t want to see it on their feed, they should block it rather than downvote every post from movies and television communities. They aren’t somehow mitigating an echo chamber by signifying how they hate movies and TV content. They’re just vandalising it.

Depends on the time between the downvotes. Believe it or not there are accounts that exist that exist purely to downvote. They do nothing else.